If you've visited Android Police over the past weekend, you've probably already seen my enthusiastic review of Total Commander for Android, which for me is replacing both ASTRO and Root Explorer going forward as the top Android file manager. Ad-free, $0, root support, dual panes, plugin support, and other advanced functions, which you can read about in the review, make Total Commander an easy choice for both novice and advanced users.

However, one task that is not immediately achievable (or so I thought) with Total Commander is something that sits right at the core of Root Explorer - writing to read-only partitions, such as /system. Root Explorer has a handy "Mount RW" button, which re-mounts such read-only partitions for writes, but Total Commander doesn't seem to offer this functionality. Bummed, I emailed the developer with a feature request, only to be enlightened by a helpful reader Sleeepy2 minutes later.

Apparently, I could re-mount partitions as read-write in Total Commander all along, and now I'm passing this knowledge to you.

Remember the button bar which can be customized with your own shortcuts and commands? Turns out Re-mount is one such command.

Comments

Kijar

Hello nice post, thank you. I use both Astro and Root Explorer. My question is can I replace both apps with just this one? How about replace Astro and keep Root Explorer? Thank you much, please email me if possible. Best of luck to you!

You can replace either of the apps with it, or keep all 3 - it's entirely up to you, but I think TC does everything both Astro and RE do, for free and even better. The best way would be to try it out and see for yourself.

Thank you so much I couldn't write to /system/media for my new boot animation!

Martin Thomas Fei

Same here. It worked once when I saved a file and it automatically mounted as root. Now, a week later, the same procedure fails. And issuing the remount command results in Re-mount error. It is because of 4.3? I just recently updated.

Ajay

it says, Permission Denied,

sssnej

Thanx a lot for this tutorial. Works now very well!

Carlo

Grazie al cazzo che funziona! il problema c'è quando uno non è root!!

Rich Markle

I have a samsung galaxy tab 4 7.0 sm-t230nu wifi-only. Rooted. My device shows the file android.hardware.usb.host.xml when using total command, yet I still can not get a usb host otg cable to work and it's not showing in otg host checker.
Suggestions please........ ;]

feruz

tq tq tq tq tq tq tq

U really save my life. I almost kill myself trying all those un-rewritable/unsave-able editor from PlayStore until I read your recommendation above